Healthcare Marketing Matters

Sunday, February 18, 2018

Dateline Anywhere USA. Hospital anywhere closed today after
serving the community for 80 years. Beset by changes in reimbursement,
competition from retail medicine, telehealth, innovation and an empowered
healthcare consumer, hospital leadership and Board of Directors could not adapt
to the new healthcare market. Hundreds of
employees lost jobs as hospital leadership blamed declining reimbursement and utilization.…, as reported in the local paper.

Is that the headline of a story written each day in papers around
the country fueled by provider leadership? It’s a scary thought, and unfortunately,
a story that written all too often. From
a marketing perspective, it’s not entirely
avoidable but could be.

In the end, the inability to adapt quickly enough and meet
the needs of the healthcare consumer and patient
utilizing less costly treatment alternatives and innovative services that meet
their needs along the dimensions of price, outcomes, engagement, and experience will write that story.

Blaming declining
reimbursements as the sole contributor to the closure of a hospital would be a
mistake. An important contributor as the leadership could not adapt or guide
the healthcare enterprise through the transition to a quality-based
reimbursement system, yes. But not the
sole reason as some may have you believe.

Unless the healthcare enterprise is the sole community
provider, there are always alternatives. If leadership is being
honest, this is a new reality for many.

What to do.

This blog post isn’t about P4P, capitation, risk-sharing,
ACOs, quality payments or any other of the myriad
of reimbursement models in operational practice. What we are
discussing is what providers can do from a marketing standpoint to
mitigate the risk of that headline becoming a reality.

Marketing is an asset
and not just there to make things look pretty.

Survival in today’s environment requires focus beyond
readmissions, patient safety improvements, elimination of preventable deaths,
cost reductions, quality improvements, etc. All very important business critical mandates
as well as the cost of doing business in today’s healthcare world. While doing
all of that you still have to find ways to grow.

Eight steps to growth along the four dimensions of price, outcomes,
engagement, and experience

1.Become the customer-focused
organization for real and not in thought or a grand stagey on paper.

It’s about your
focus on the healthcare consumer and patient, not the hospitals. It’s an
external market focus compared to an internal focus. It’s about becoming the
healthcare consumer/patient-focused
hospital. And saying that the healthcare enterprise has a customer-centric focus, doesn’t make it so.
Measure the healthcare enterprise against the 20 MAKKOR scale attributes of a customer-focused
organization. Then and only then will
one know what the improvement steps needed
for the journey.

2.Evaluate
the healthcare enterprise brand and competitive position.

Consumers and patients are ready for transparency and convenient
technology-enabled access to care. Healthcare providers that can identify
meeting these needs and how they want their healthcare needs meet though
technology focused on them will gain new
patients and the next-generation of physicians.

3.Engage
healthcare customers and patients all the time.

An individual is only a patient 1/3rd of the time they encounter
you. That is the diagnosis, treatment
and recovery phase. Pre and post this
experience; they are a healthcare
consumer, not a patient. So why then is it the only time one chooses
to meaningfully engage them is during the period when they are a patient? Engaging the healthcare consumer on a
continuous basis builds loyalty and importantly keeps them in the network, which has some significant financial
ramifications in a risk-based reimbursement model.

4.Engage
the physicians.

No matter the payment models, the hospital or health system still needs
a physician or physician extender’s order to get anything done in a healthcare
setting. That means engaging physicians in meaningful ways, using the methods,
technology, and systems that will make
their life easier, improve their productivity and protect or increase their
income. An effective and efficient physician has more to do with the impact of
cost and quality in the hospital than any other factor.

5.Improve
the physician experience.

How hard is it for a physician or physician extender to practice
medicine in your organization? Have you
looked at the hassle factor that physician’s encounter when they try to get
things done in the hospital setting?
Understand how the physician experiences your organization at every
touch-point they encounter the hospital. Understand their experiences overall
from beginning to end, not just in an isolated segment. Fix what’s broken, keep what is working. The more
satisfying the experience, the better you will do financially.

6.Make the healthcare consumer/patient
experience memorable.

A healthcare provider's ability to deliver an experience that sets it
apart in the eyes of its patients and potential patients from its competitors -
traditional and non-traditional - serves to increase their loyalty to the
brand. One needs to actively manage the customer experience in totality by
understanding the customer's point of view.
That is, all touch points internally and externally that a
customer/patient meets which in turn creates the experience. Exceptional
experience means gains in market share, brand awareness, and revenue.

7.Embrace
and join the retail healthcare movement.

Traditional ways of delivering healthcare will go by the wayside in many
cases. Price convenience, access, and outcomes are the drivers in retail
healthcare. Find the need, understand
the consumer’s behavior drivers, design offering around the consumer, not the hospital in a convenient location and
price it appropriately. If you can't compete in this way market position, share
and revenue will erode

8.Social
media is the currency for reaching audiences.

Turn
to social media and networks to engage, manage the experience and drive
adherence. As healthcare continues the evolution of a healthcare consumer dominated retail
environment, social networking is a healthcare marketing channel that is
underutilized and underperforms today but
holds great potential to improve engagement, experience, and adherence.

All of this takes organizational change, leadership, vision and
meaningful action. An individual only needs
the hospital for three things, emergency care, intensive care, and care for
acute complex medical conditions. Meet the healthcare
consumer on their terms or see you on the
ash heap of forgotten history.

Choose carefully.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing,
communications strategist and thought-leader. As an internationally
followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters
receives over 20,000 page views a month and read
in 52 countries. He is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare
Executives, Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing
Association. Post opinions are my own. As an expert in
digital marketing & social media with a Klout score of 64, that places me
in the top 10 percent of social media experts nationwide. Michael is a
micro-influencer.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Hospitals have a marketing problem. Their marketing is neither consistent or sustainable and appears
random to the healthcare consumer. There are of course many reasons for this, most notable are resources – capital and human, as
well as organizational barriers from lack of leadership marketing knowledge and
an unwillingness to change the marketing practices of the past.

The economy has shifted from a product and service economy to an
experience economy. Think Amazon. Hospitals
and health systems, any healthcare provider,
are operating in that same experience and engagement economy.

To be successful then, in spite
of the inconsistent and randomness of hospital marketing to the healthcare consumer
or patient, requires the marketing becomes a sticker.
It also means the use of nudge techniques to influence healthcare consumer choice
and behavior.

Now what?

To grow and thrive in the experience economy while all else is in
flames around the hospital or health system, it means moving from traditional marketing to experiential marketing that
addresses needs of and meets the experience expectations of the healthcare
consumer and patient.

Making provider marketing sticky is all about the care experience and
engagement of the person on a very personal level. And given the multitude of
ways, one of the most effective will be social media.

Social media is about amplification of the experience, and of the brand.
It is also the amplification of marketing that is sticky via nudges.

What the above all represents is how in an experience economy a consumer
takes action. Not necessarily responding
to traditional marketing, they are looking for the experience of what you do, not
how you do it with technology, bricks, and
mortar or smiling physicians accepting new patients.

Here are ten new marketing rules in an experience economy for making
provider marketing stickier:

1.Understand fully and completely the healthcare
consumer and person experience. With over 147 touch-points for consumer and
patient experience with a hospital. It’s vital in the experience economy that
marketing understands what information they are seeking, and deliver it to them
at the right experience touch-point with the right call-to-action.

2.Content is king. Make it memorable. It’s how you
drive engagement through effective and compelling storytelling around the
experience of care, not the how of the care.
From the web site to Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Periscope, etc, focus on the experience. Be visual. Be
compelling.

3.Identify and work with key influencer’s. Influencers
need to ample your message through social media. Encourage user-generated content.

4.Key content
included testimonials about the experience of care and engagement from
patients and healthcare consumers.

5.Integrate and communicate the value of the brand,
key brand messages and brand promise across all channels.

6.Use social media and SEO to amplify your
message. Influencer’s and patients providing testimonials need to complete
online reviews to raise your placement in Google and other search engine
results.

7.Integrate the information and experience across
all channels and platforms that consumer will use- desktop, smartphone or tablet for a seamless experience. No
disconnects. The healthcare consumer moves freely between all three devices expecting
the same experience across all three.

8.Traditional marketing needs to focus more on the outcome and experience to drive
engagement. No more pretty building,
smiling doctors, shiny new equipment.

9.Teach employees how to use their social media
channels to amplify the provider.

10.Teach the healthcare organization that marketing
today is no longer about transactions but value. Transactions will come after the value is
understood.

Many traditional healthcare traditionalists
will say this is just all nonsense. That
marketing has no place in the experience or engagement management process. But then when you look at that advice, have
any real, tangible, and measurable results been
accomplished outside of hearing what one desires to be told? Or, is
it just treading water until the next healthcare market move slaps one
upside the head?

There is no escaping or slowing down the experience economy as it
overtakes healthcare.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing,
communications strategist and thought-leader. As an internationally
followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters
receives over 20,000 page views a month and read
in 52 countries. He is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare
Executives, Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing
Association. Post opinions are my own.

Sunday, February 4, 2018

No eye rolls, please. It’s
Super Bowl Sunday, and the thought occurred
what can I learn strategically for provider marketing from the teams preparing
to play on the world’s biggest stage.

But I guess once all the hoopla is said and done, it all comes
down to playing the game that the participants have played for a great majority
of their life. It’s the same for
provider marketers in an upside-down market where the healthcare consumer gains
power each day. Trust us just doesn’t work anymore.

As a marketing professional and mentor, one must learn how
to handle success and failure. Endure leadership changes, people who don’t know
what they are talking about but think
they do, or the long-tenured leadership
that looks at you and your recommendations with the “I have seen women and men
like you to come and go, and I am still here,”
attitude.

In the end, if there
are any really important lessons it’s all about the strategy, teamwork and
adapting whether you like or not.

The successful Super Bowl teams, besides a little luck along
the way, know strategy and adaptation. From their use of data and analysis with
the outcomes of actions leading to an understanding of the results and key
inflection points, the strategy going forward determined,
and a plan developed for execution.

But herein lies the major difference.

During the execution of the plan, rapid and nearly immediate
response to changing conditions takes place.
Strategy, adaptability and continuous learning measured against expectations. If
it doesn’t work, make changes. Pretty simple really.

Here are my ten Super Bowl LII lessons for healthcare marketers:

1.Keep calm. Healthcare is changing in ways that have turned the market upside down. That doesn’t mean the game is over. It just
means your strategy needs to change because the market is rushing ahead of you.

2. Change it up! If you keep doing what one has
always done, this market will just pound the daylights out of the organization.
Stop doing the same things the same way as
one has always done.

3.Fail Fast. Mistakes happen because of errors, and that is just a fact of life. Plans don’t always work as intended. So like winning sports teams when things go wrong,
stop, and change to get a better result.

4.Change up your marketing channels. Delivering
the same message, the same way every time is a prescription for disaster.
People stop paying attention, so one must move the messages around and use all
the channels available. Your audience regardless of age is omnichannel.

5.Build the marketing team capability and
chemistry. That may mean new players.
Change is good, and everyone needs to learn new marketing skills and to play nice
in the sandbox. One cannot be successful
if there is no team chemistry and the team members can’t fill in for another.
New skills breed new ideas and capabilities.

6.Listen to your coaches, i.e., leadership. It may seem like an oxymoron sometimes especially
with marketing because anyone can do it, but you need to be at the leadership
table and understand the business strategy, operational plans, and financial challenges. Only then can one
make a positive contribution.

7.Do the unexpected. That keeps your competition off balance. One
can build the organizational marketing story and meet the healthcare
consumer’s needs before anyone else has the chance.

8.Know the strengths and weaknesses of the team
and competitors. Put team members in positions and situations to win. Go after competitors
at their weakest point. If they can’t figure it out,
keep doing it until they learn how then change.

9.You win some; you lose some. No organization is
perfect, put the loss behind you and learn. Enjoy the wins for a moment but move on to
the next game. Learn from the past and adapt strategically and in your
execution.

10.Have fun and play with passion. I think that is
the biggest lesson from all of this. Life is about passion, friendships,
success and learning from failure.

No one remembers who lost. Work is the same. Have fun and
play with passion. Life is too short.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing,
communications strategist and thought-leader. As an internationally
followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters
receives over 20,000 page views a month and read
in 52 countries. He is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare
Executives, Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing
Association. Post opinions are my own.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

The eye rolls commence from across the industry at the sight of the headline with everyone thinking; I have a marketing plan. We are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media channels. We even have the annual wellness calendar telling us when it’s time be doing things. And on and on.

I don’t know about you, but I consider myself an insured healthcare consumer.

So, what has this got to do with anything in the headline?

A lot.

Because to the insured healthcare consumer, it’s all random noise that is not connected. And it is random in part because there is no sustainable or continuous market presence.

For example, the other day I received a direct mail newsletter from a hospital. Well, saying “I received” is probably misleading. Whomever the person that lives here named Resident is the one who received the mail. It was the first time I had heard from that provider in years.

Random.

Out of the blue comes a direct mail piece. Which by the way, though nicely produced, did not engage me in any meaningful way? Oh, you do surgery and have a new shiny MRI? Big deal, so does all the other hospitals. I am supposed to choose you because of that? Hmm, try again.

The random advertisement is running once or twice. The cable TV spot on a couple of channels. The occasional update on the Facebook page. Look, there’s a billboard. Heard that sports radio program sponsorship. But none of it is connected or sustained.

Randomness.

The insured healthcare consumer is omnichannel. The insured healthcare consumer is wired to the omnichannel Internet of Things. The insured healthcare consumer expects to be communicated with on their terms in a meaningful way that engages them on a personal level. The insured healthcare consumer expects that it is all about them and not all about the hospital.

It’s not about the hospital marketing plan and showing the activity of doing random things that appear coherent on paper. It’s about how you consistently use those activities and channels with a sustainable market presence to bring measurable value that engages the insured healthcare consumer.

And you can’t engage or demonstrate a meaningful value proposition to the insured healthcare consumer when your marketing is so random in appearance to the consumer.

Healthcare changed in a way unimaginable from a few years ago, but hospitals seem to be living in a bubble in many ways acting like the consumer healthcare market hasn’t changed. I know that this isn’t easy but my goodness, at some point hospitals must get their go to market strategy figured out and start meeting the insured healthcare consumer on their terms.

The insured healthcare consumer understands that they only need a hospital for three things, emergency care, intensive care and care for acute complex medical conditions.

Even though marketing budgets are constrained, it is the responsibility of marketers for figuring out the strategy for a continuous and sustainable market presence in an omnichannel world. Senior leadership and Boards need to come to grips with this reality as well. It’s not about you anymore, and it hasn’t been for a very long time.

And your first step is to bring the marketing voice back to the senior leadership table as a vice president position reporting to the CEO. Without that voice at the table and the respect that comes along with it, not much changes.

Your hospital marketing is random and unconnected to the healthcare consumer. Stay that way, and it will be like a crime scene, move along, nothing to see here.

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing, communications strategist and thought-leader. As an internationally followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters receives over 20,000 page views a month and read in 52 countries. He is a Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives, Professional Certified Marketer, American Marketing Association. Post opinions are my own.